Windows, RDS Server - LACP Trunk to HP 5412Zl - Do I need to enable multicast-routing?

[MichaelRicardo]

Hello,

Have Windows, RDS Server - LACP Trunk to HP 5412Zl - Do I need to enable multicast-routing?

Kind Regards,

Michael

[16again]

afaik, you haven't yet mentioned a server, service or application that requires multicast routing

[MichaelRicardo]

Windows Server 2012 runing Remote Desktop Services/Apps and available to Internal Users or Internet Facing - allowing them to work from home.

[16again]

afaik the internet isn't multicast enabled, so there's no need to spend time on multicast routing

[MichaelRicardo]

even for few internal users - it won't matter? 

[Vince-Whirlwind]

Lots and lots of things use multicast on local segments, but from your point of view, you only need to enable multicast routing if either,

 - you have a specific app that requires it (enabling multicast routing enables some functionality you wouldn't have otherwise)
or
 - you have a multimedia app that can use it (enabling multicast routing reduces bandwidth consumption)

You haven't mentioned anything that points to either of these things being an issue.

And just to add to the comment about the internet not supporting multicast, if your home users were on a VPN tunnel, then multicast routing might be enabled end-to-end, however unless multiple users were on the *same* VPN tunnel, you wouldn't get any benefit anyway.

The only time you really need to worry about layer-3 multicast is if you are implementing a media-streaming system across a large-ish LAN and/or a MAN/WAN that uses dark fibre links or an encapsulated L2-style network like MPLS.

If you want to teach yourself how multicast routing works, I use VLC server, personally.

Setup the VLC server on one VLAN, then setup a client on each of two different VLANs.
Subscribe from a client to the stream. Observe the VLC server's interface stats (maximum granularity - 5s ideally).
Subscribe from the second client. Observe the server's interface traffic doubling.
Then enable multicast routing and observe that multiple clients don't increase the bandwidth utilisation at the server end.